MANY were the varieties of New England life
before the American Revolution. Each township maintained its own
peculiar laws; clung to its own peculiar customs; cherished its own
peculiar traditions. Never, perhaps, except in Greece, were local
self-government and local patriotism pushed to such an extreme. Not
only did commonwealth hold itself separate from commonwealth, but
township from township, and often, village from village. Long
stretches of uninhabited land effectively divided these self-reliant
communities from one another. "The road to Boston," says one of the
most graphic of New England's local historians,*
when speaking of the route from Buzzard's Bay, in 1743, was "narrow
and tortuous - a lane through a forest having rocks and quagmires
and long reaches of sand, which made it almost impassable to wheels,
if any there were to be ventured upon it. Branches of large trees
were stretched over it, so that it was unvisited by sunlight, except
at those places where it crossed the clearings on which a solitary
husbandman had established his homestead, or where it followed the
sandy shores of some of those picturesque ponds which feed the
rivers emptying into Buzzard's Bay. Occasionally a deer bounded
across the path, and foxes were seen running into the thickets."
Such roads, picturesque as they were, naturally discouraged travel.
Occasionally a Congregational council called together the ministers
of several towns at an installation or an ordination. Once a year
the meeting of the General Court tempted the rural authorities up to
the capital; during a week's time a few travelers may have ridden by
on horseback and stayed at the village inn; now and then a visitor
came to town, making no little stir, or perhaps a new immigrant
settled on the confines of the parish. But there were then no
Methodist preachers, with short and frequent pastorates, and no
commercial travelers, with boxes of the latest goods, who could
serve as conductors of thought and gossip from village to village
and make them homogeneous. America was not then a land of travelers.
"What little travel there might have been, was often still further
discouraged by local ordinances, and in many a town, a citizen had
to have a special permit from the Selectmen before he could
entertain a guest for anything over a fortnight. Thus one father was
fined ten shillings for showing hospitality to his daughter beyond
the legal period. In many a spot in early
New England the protectionist
principle was so thoroughly localized that the importation of labor,
as well as of merchandise, was rigorously restricted. Towns so
insulated naturally took on distinctive traits. Even religious
customs, literal scripturalists as these people were, differed in
different places. The Puritan
Sabbath began on Saturday night in one commonwealth, on Sunday
morning in another. In brief, no picture of any one town can serve
as a picture of any other.

* Mr. W.
R. Bliss, in his "Colonial Times on Buzzard's Bay," an
excellent depiction of early New England life, from which
other quotations will appear later in this work.

To describe a typical Puritan home, therefore, is
not easy. Yet it is not impossible. For the New England Puritans
were a peculiar and easily distinguished people. The fundamental
differences in character which set them off from the rest of the
world, are far more prominent to the eye than are the local
differences which divided town from town. A
Connecticut settler, or even a
Rhode Island Baptist, might be taken
for a Massachusetts Puritan, but a
Knickerbocker could be mistaken for neither.

To begin with, the New Englanders were the most
truly benevolent and unselfish people of their time. They had hardly
set foot on New England's shore before their history was marked by a
magnanimous act of genuine forgiveness of injuries. It was in the
middle of the landing at Plymouth Rock, when the colony was
prostrated by illness and was exposed to the worst inclemencies of a
new and inclement climate. Destitute of every provision which the
weakness and daintiness of the invalid require," so runs the
description of a well-known historian, "the sick lay crowded in the
unwholesome vessel or in half built cabins, heaped around with
snow-drifts.
The rude sailors refused them even a share of those
coarse sea-stores which would have given a little variety to their
diet, till disease spread among the crew and the kind ministrations
of those whom they had neglected and affronted brought them to a
better temper." There could be no better example of Christian
forbearance than this. At the start the Indians also came within the
scope of the Puritan's charity. He nursed them assiduously in times
of small-pox, rescued many a child from a plague-stricken wigwam,
helped them through times of famine, Christianized and partially
civilized some of them, and in business dealings treated them not
only justly but with a sincere though tactless kindness. The
Puritan's home life was unselfish; he was profoundly regardful of
his children, though he evinced that regard not by indulging them,
but by painstaking discipline and a rigorous thrift, the better to
provide for their future. It was a French Jesuit of the last century
who testified that the New Englander, unlike the Canadian, labored
for his heirs.
These early settlers made staunch neighbors. They
were ready at almost any time to leave their work to drive a pin or
nail in a young homemaker's new dwelling-house as a token of their
good will, while they found their greatest pleasures in such means
of mutual helpfulness as corn-huskings, quilting-bees, and
barn-raisings. They were, no doubt, exacting and unsympathetic
masters, but in the commands which they enjoined they kept in view
the moral welfare of their slaves and servants as of far greater
importance than their own material prosperity. Never were slaves
better treated than in New England.

The Puritans were strenuously intent on making
the world, not only better, but, as they thought, happier. It was to
guard the more solid pleasures of a pure homelife and of an honest
pride in one's country, that they bulwarked themselves against the
encroachments of sordid self-indulgences. But they went about their
task in crude fashion. They recognized, for instance, quite wisely,
that there is no more insidious enemy of happiness than vanity,
which makes a man utterly miserable whenever he is ignored and only
uneasily pleased even when he is admired the most, but they tried to
eradicate vanity from the human heart not by planting something
better in its place, but by such petty sumptuary laws as prohibiting
the wearing of lace. They simply attempted to cut off whatever might
minister to vanity's indulgence. Their chief reliance for improving
the condition of the world was in a countless number of minute
restrictions and self-limitations. The more law there is, however,
the more there needs to be, for prohibit nine-pins and soon there
will be a new game of ten-pins to prohibit also. So it was with the
Puritans. Restriction was placed here and restriction was placed
there, until restriction became constriction and grew intolerable.
The children were never allowed to lose sight of parental reulations,
the parents of township ordinances, the town of state laws. But it
was in the number and pettiness of these laws, not any cruelty in
them, which made them intolerable, for the humanity of New England's
legislators is evinced in the fact that there were only ten crimes
punishable with death in New England when there were one hundred and
sixty in Old England. The New Englanders were swaddled, not chained.
The best that was in them did not have full play, but it had more
play than it could have had in any other country, except Great
Britain and Holland.

From the start New England was a country of
homes. The typical New England dwelling was the work of several
generations. It had begun perhaps as a solidly built but plain
rectangular house of one story and two rooms. In one of them the
good wife cooked the meals on the hearth and simple cooking was
never better done; laid the table, as meal-time approached, with the
neat wooden bowls, plates, platters, and spoons and primitive knives
of the time, or, the meal over, received a neighbor dropping in on a
friendly errand, or perhaps the minister making the rounds of his
parish. This was the living room, the centre of the family life. The
other room contained two great bedsteads with their puffy
feather-beds, while the trundle-bed in the corner betrayed the
presence of little children in the household. If the family was
large, a rude ladder led the way to a sleeping-place in the garret.

Slowly but faithfully the farmer added to the
size and to the comforts of his home. What a place the hearth soon
became! " In the wide fireplace and over the massive back-log,
crane, jack, spit and pot-hook did substantial work, while the
embers kept bake-kettle and frying-pan in hospitable exercise." Here
was the place for the iron, copper or brass and irons, often wrought
into curious devices and religiously kept bright and polished. In
front of the fire was the broad wooden seat for four or five
occupants, with its generously high back to keep off the cold. This
was the famous New England settle, making an inviting and cozy
retreat for the parents in their brief rests from labor, or perhaps
for lovers when the rest of the house was still. On each side of the
hearth, in lieu of better seats were wooden blocks on which the
children sat as they drew close to the fire on winter evenings to
work or read by its blaze. Perhaps, in some corner of the room could
be seen the brass warming-pan, which every winter's evening was
filled with embers and carried to the sleeping chambers to give a
temporary warmth to the great feather-beds. There was a place near
at hand for the snow-shoes, while matchlocks, swords, pikes, halbert,
and some pieces of armor fixed against the wall showed that the
farmer obeyed the town ordinances and kept himself prepared against
Indian raids.

Colonists Grinding Corn

For like all frontiersmen, these farmers never
felt secure. The Indians, instigated by the French, and exasperated
by the cheating and bullying English adventurers, who had crept into
New England against the colonists'
will, were not only the cruelest of foes, they were the most
treacherous of friends. They had pillaged and destroyed more than
one secluded and unsuspecting settlement, murdering, torturing, or
carrying into captivity, as they pleased, the peaceful inhabitants.
The big, vague rumors of such midnight raids exercised their uncanny
spell over many a household as it gathered about the hearth of a
winter's evening. There was the Deerfield massacre, for instance.
Just before the dawn of a cold winter's night the Indians fell upon
the fated village. They spent twenty-four hours in wanton
destruction, slaughtered sixty helpless prisoners, and carried a
hundred back with them for an eight weeks' cruel march to the north,
during which nineteen victims were murdered on the way and two were
starved to death.

Such was the story associated with the arms upon
the wall; but a happier story was told by the ears of corn, the
crooknecks, the dried fruit, and the flitches of bacon hanging from
the beams and ceiling of the room. They were a perpetual reminder of
Thanksgiving Day. If the Puritan discountenanced Christmas
observances as smacking of "papishness" — he showed by the
Thanksgiving Day feast, his appreciation of the good things of
earth. It was characteristic of the early New Englanders to make
much of little things. The housewife was rightfully proud of her
simple but nice cooking, and her husband of his plain but
substantial produce. There is something appetizing in the very
thought of their homely but choice dishes, their hasty-pudding,
their Yankee breads, their pumpkin and mince pies. These simple
people cultivated to an unsurpassed extent the wholesome pleasure
which comes from a full appreciation of nature's wealth of gifts.
They were lovers and cultivators of the wholesome fruits. It was a
custom often observed in New England to give a favorite tree or bush
a special and appropriate name, as a token of affection and so to
make it seem the more companionable. The Puritan, indeed, had strong
local affections and attachments. He found his pleasures in what
came to his hand and made pleasures often out of the work he had to
do. He provided little that was even amusement for his children, but
this misfortune was alleviated by the abundant outlet for youthful
energies which they found in the activities of the household. There
was little time which could be spent in mere amusement. The home was
a hive of busy workers. The planting, cultivating and harvesting of
his crops consumed perhaps the smaller portion of the farmer's time.
Cattle raising for the west Indies and sheep growing took much of
his attention. He was something of a lumberman, as well, and still
more of a mechanic. Perhaps he bought iron rods and, when debarred
from outdoor labor, hammered them into nails at the kitchen
fireside. It was much more important, however, that he should have
some skill at carpentry. Often too, he carved out of wood his table
dishes. In the diverse industries of his house was the germ of many
a nucleus factory. From his wife's busy loom came homespun cloth for
the family. In the kitchen were distilled her favorite remedies. The
children of the family were not only kept busy; they were kept
thinking; their inventive faculties were constantly on the alert.
Hardly a week passed but a new device was needed. Early in the
history of New England, to be sure, there were tanners who would
keep half the skins they received and return the other half in
leather, brickmakers, masons, carpenters, millers with very busy
wind-mills, curriers, sawyers, smiths, fullers, malsters,
shoe-makers, wheelwrights, weavers and other artisans to do the work
of specialists in the community, yet the farmer did not a little for
himself in every one of these trades. His home was an industrial
community in and of itself.

The fisherman who dwelt upon the sea-coast needed
quite as active and versatile a family as did his inland brother. He
left them to build the boats, hoop the casks, forge the irons, and
manage the many other industries pre-requisite to the complete
outfit of a vessel for a long and hazardous voyage. At any time they
might be obliged to support themselves entirely or be thrown upon
the town, for all fishing out at sea is a dangerous vocation, and
whaling had its peculiar perils. Occasionally a boat and crew were
sunk by the tremendous blows with which some great whale lashed the
sea in his death agony. Now and then one of these tormented giants
would turn madly upon his pursuers. Then, so says one careful
historian, "he attacked boats, deliberately, crushing them like
egg-shells, killing and destroying whatever his massive jaws seized
in their horrid nip. His rage was as tremendous as his bulk; when
will brought a purpose to his movement, the art of man was no match
for the erratic creature." One such fighting monster attacked the
good ship "Essex," striking with his head just forward of her
forechains. The ship, says the mate, "brought up as suddenly and
violently as if she had struck a rock, and trembled for a few
seconds like a leaf." She had already begun to settle when the whale
came again, crashing with his head through her bows. There was bare
time to provision and man the small boats before the vessel sank.
The crew suffered from long exposure and severe privations, and only
a part of them were ever saved.

Such tales as this reached inland and attracted
boyish lovers of adventure to the sea. There were other and
different tales of the sea, as well, to allure them tales of great
wealth amassed in the India trade, of prizes captured from the
French by audacious privateersmen, or of pirates, then scourging the
sea, or, more boldly still, entering Boston harbor and
squandering-their ill-gotten gains at the Boston taverns. The ocean
was then the place for the brave and the ambitious. It is a
significant fact that probably the first book of original fiction
ever published in New England was "The Algerine Captive," a story of
a sailor's slavery among the Moors. Yet this story was long in
coming. New England produced no fiction of its own and reprinted
little of old England's until ten years after the close of the
American Revolution. In the early farmhouses, the library consisted
of two or three shelves of Puritan theology. As time went on
Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, a few ecclesiastical and local
histories, one or more records of
witchcraft trials, and some doggerel verse from the New England
poets were added to the dry and scant supply of reading. Yet the
enterprising and imaginative reader, though a child, could ferret
out not a few exciting episodes from such uninviting volumes as
Josephus's "History of the Jews," or Rev. Mr. Williams's record of
Indian Captivity, while by 1720 a few of the more fortunate little
ones had a printed copy of Mother Goose jingles for their amusement.
But, although this was all the reading the farmer had for the
newspapers were wretched and were seldom seen fifty miles from
Boston—it must not be supposed that he underestimated the value of
books. He read far more than the modern farmer does indeed all he
could afford to get and had the time for; the clergy of the time
often had substantial libraries of one or two or even three hundred
volumes; while in the Revolutionary period, any young lady in a
well-to-do family could easily obtain the best writings of Dryden,
Pope, Addison, Swift, Thomson, and the other classic writers of the
eighteenth century.

Indeed, the "young lady," as the feature of human
society, was not altogether neglected, even in earlier times. To be
sure, she could not dance without shocking most, if not all, of the
community; she could not act in church charades—for all dramatic
exhibitions were forbidden by law; but in the intervals between her
sewing and her housekeeping cares, she played battledore and
shuttlecock with her sister or friends, or practiced the
meeting-house tunes on the old-fashioned and quaint spinet or
virginal. If she were so fortunate as to be born in the eighteenth
century instead of the seventeenth, she was regularly escorted by
her swain to the singing-school, which not only furnished training
in psalmody, but was the occasion of much social companionship among
the young people of the village, and of not a little match-making.

These gatherings often started incidentally other
intellectual interests besides those of music, and books were
discussed and recommended. Here was the birthplace of the reading
circle and the modern lecture system. Awkward and restrained as
their society manners were, the Puritans were a social people;
jealously as they preserved their home-life, they joined quite as
readily as do modern farmers in general village pleasures. The barn
raisings for men, the quilting-bees for women and the merry corn-huskings
and house-warmings for both, were not the only social gatherings of
young and old. Every ordination, or installation of a new minister;
it came seldom, to be sure, was the occasion of feasting and a
sociable assembling by the congregation. Training day was another
time when the township was full with excitement. Every male citizen
of the village, from the boy of sixteen to the man of sixty, was
compelled on these occasions to shoulder his musket and march in the
militia. An awkward squad of amateur soldiers they were, as they
paraded the village, complacent and valiant in fair weather, but
bedraggled, crestfallen and wofully diminished in numbers in wet.
Yet the women and children were proud of them and followed along the
route. In honor of the occasion special booths were erected for the
sale of gingerbread and harmless drinks to the on-lookers. The
tavern too was kept busy, for every settlement of any pretensions
had a tavern, where the passing traveler might get refreshment for
himself and his horse. Here the selectmen planned the village policy
for the consideration of the town-meeting. Here too were held public
debates between rival theological disputants, sitting over their
mild spirituous beverages. Here too was disseminated the latest news
from Boston and the old world.

The two other public buildings of the place were
the school-house and the meeting-house. As early as 1647, every
Massachusetts village of fifty house-holders was required by state
law to maintain a school, in which the catechism and the rudiments
of reading, writing and arithmetic should be taught, while every
town which boasted a hundred householders was obliged to establish a
grammar school. But New England was not dependent upon these schools
alone for her education. Massachusetts and Connecticut each had its
college, in which learned and often eminent men trained the more
ambitious youth of the land. One hundred thousand graduates were
among the early emigrants from England and mingled with the people,
while in the first days of the church, the pulpits even in the
smaller towns, were almost without exception filled with men
accomplished in the best learning of the time.

The church was the centre of the community's
social and political life. Attendance on public worship was
enforced, during many decades and in many places, by village
ordinance. Church and state were curiously confused. Only church
members were allowed to vote at town-meetings, and the selectmen of
the village assigned the seats to the congregation, according to the
peculiar regulations of the town-meeting. Customs differed in
different places. In some villages, just before service began, the
men would file in on one side of the church and the women on the
other, while the boys and girls, separated from each other as
scrupulously, were uncomfortably fixed in the gallery, or placed on
the gallery stairs, or on the steps leading up to the pulpit. It was
in one of these churches that the following ordinance was enforced
"Ordered that all ye boys of ye town are and shall be appointed to
sitt upon ye three pair of stairs in ye meeting-house on the Lord's
day, and Wm. Lord is appointed to look to the boys yt sit upon ye
pulpit stairs, and ye other stairs Reuben Guppy is to look to."

In other meeting-houses, each household had a
curious box pew of its own, fashioned according to the peculiar
tastes of its occupants. The assignment of pew room in these places
of worship was determined by the most careful class distinctions,
for democratic as the Puritans were in their political institutions
and commercial methods, each family jealously guarded whatever
aristocratic pretensions it might have inherited. To the plain
seats in the gallery were relegated the humbler members of the
parish; a few young couples had pews of their own set off for them
there, while a special gallery was occasionally provided for the
negro slaves. There was no method of heating the edifice; to warm
their feet the women had recourse to foot-stoves, carried to the
meeting-house by the children or apprentices; the men to the more
primitive method of pinching their shins together. When the
hourglass in the pulpit had marked the passage of an hour and a
half, the sermon usually came to a close, and the people in the
gallery descended and marched two abreast up one aisle and past the
long pew which directly faced the pulpit and in which the elders and
deacons sat. Here was the money-box, into which each person dropped
his shilling or more, as the case might be, while the line was
turning down the other aisle. There was an intermission of service
at noon, when the people ate their luncheon in the adjacent
school-house, where a wood-stove could be found, and discussed the
village gossip and the public notices posted on the meeting-house
door. In every family the minister of the parish was received with
an awe and reverence which seemed suitable not only to the dignity
of his calling, but to the extreme gravity of his deportment and the
impressive character of his learning. In weight and authority he was
the peer of the village officials. Only the squire, the appointee of
the Crown, was his superior; for he held his office as
representative of the Crown. If offenders did not pay the fines
imposed upon them, this village dignitary could place them in the
stocks, or order them to be whipped. Persons who lived disorderly, "misspending their precious time, he could send to work-house, to the
stocks, or to the whipping-post, at his discretion. He could break
open doors where liquors were concealed to defraud His Majesty's
excise. He could issue hue-and-cries for runaway servants and
thieves. There are instances on record in which a justice of the
peace issued his warrant to arrest the town minister, about whose
orthodoxy there were distressing rumors, and required him to be
examined upon matters of doctrine and faith. But a more pleasing
function of his office was to marry those who came to him for
marriage, bringing the town clerk's certificate that their nuptial
intentions had been proclaimed at three religious meetings in the
parish during the preceding fortnight."

The Squire's office, however, was an English, not
an American institution, and did not long survive on our soil. What
was peculiar to New England public life was the town meeting, held
in the parish church. Every freeman of the township was obliged to
attend it, under penalty of a fine. It distributed in early days the
land among the settlers; it regulated, often according to
communistic and often according to protectionist principles, the
industries of the community; and it repressed gay fashions and
undue liberties in speech and deportment. Its representatives were
the selectmen and town-clerk, and were held in high esteem, from the
respect due to their office.

Yet none of these dignitaries, much as they were
held in awe, could permanently suppress the instincts of youth for
gayer fashions and happier times. It is impossible on any rational
basis to explain the inconsistent Puritan standards of right and
wrong amusements. The most conscientious of Puritans would go,
merely out of curiosity, to a hanging, and see no harm in it, but he
looked with grave suspicion on church chimes as a worldly frivolity.
Feasting he encouraged and religious services he discouraged at a
funeral. Marriage he made a secular function; the franchise
religious. To dancing he objected as improper and to card playing as
dangerous, but he saw no harm in kissing-games and lotteries.
Finally the influence of the city proved too much for him. Boston
customs were imitated in the provincial towns. Young and old
indulged in the fashionable disfigurements of the day. The women
wore black patches on their faces to set off their complexions and
the men slashed the sleeves of their coats to show the fine quality
of their underclothes, and even funeral services became occasions
for display. Sumptuary laws were ignored or repealed. The country
towns became social centres. By the time of the American Revolution,
New England was already merging from Puritanism, with its virtues
and limitations, into a new Americanism, with its new merits and its
new defects.

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